Hi all,
A small group of people have begun to look into the problem of lack
of good, easy to use documentation for WebObjects and wonder, and
based on feedback from the developer lists, we have created spaces at
http://wiki.objectstyle.org/confluence/display/WO/Home for the
documentation. Right now those spaces are all empty, and almost none
of them have been claimed by an author to fill them. We are hoping
that people will see a topic that they know a great deal about
already or want to learn a great deal about, and fill in the gaps.
If you've already written something on a topic, please post it here.
The speed of this process depends on the willingness of the community
at large. If just a small handful of people are committed, it will
take a very long time to get a useful consolidated reference library
in place, and we run the risk of the technology developing faster
than the documentation. However, if everyone steps up and
contributes even a little bit, we will quickly catch the
documentation up to the technology, and develop a great resource that
everyone benefits from. This is everyone's opportunity to contribute
to the community that they already benefit from.
There are plenty of good reasons to contribute to this effort: It's
a great way to say thanks to all of the people who have sacrificed
their time and resources to create, free of charge to you, a codebase
that enables you to remain up to date and competitive in the web
application marketplace while still using WebObjects. It's a great
way to exchange information: in return for taking 8 or 9 hours to
write a good article on something you already understand well, you
get to digest information on a topic you know nothing about in a
fraction of the time you otherwise would have had to spend to learn
it. If you were willing to spend thousands of dollars for a trip to
San Francisco to attend a developers conference which had only a tiny
amount of time to present cutting edge information, surely you can
spare a work day or two (or a week of evenings perhaps) contributing
information to a resource which makes all of this information
available to others (and yourself) at a pace that's easy to digest,
and a breadth that could never be covered at a single conference.
There are even valid selfish reasons to contribute. If you know
nothing at all about a specific topic, writing an article on it is a
great way to focus your attention to learn it. If you know only a
bit about a topic, by the time you finish authoring a well
constructed how-to in print, you will know it extremely well. You
will gain respect and gratitude from the community, and it reflects
well on the community as a whole. And if everyone does their share,
you'll be able to learn from others on any topic you need to know
about without having to do it the hard way (endless googling + trial
and error). If everyone tries to help, then the jobs and lives of
everyone who develops with WebObjects will be happier and more
productive.
Finally, please do not feel that you are too limited in your
capacities to make a worthwhile contribution. Any sincere attempt to
contribute is better than no attempt to contribute. The wiki and all
its new entries are being monitored by people who have been
programming with WebObjects for close to a decade now, and by the
authors of project wonder. If you make a mistake in your
documentation, it will be caught and corrected quickly.
We are asking people to denote that they are working on an article
before they start writing it, so that we won't be duplicating each
other's efforts (it's a big enough task if you only do it once!).
Therefore, we ask that before you claim a topic, you ensure that you
have the time and resources available to compose it in a timely
fashion (say, two weeks?). We just don't want willing people to
avoid authorship of a topic because someone has already claimed it,
and the claiming person is never actually getting around to doing it.
To contribute to the wiki, you will need to set up an account. Just
go to http://issues.objectstyle.org/jira/secure/Signup!default.jspa
to create that account. When you have chosen a topic that you want
to write on, edit the entry for that topic and change the '**' on the
end to '(under construction)'. As soon as you have your article in
place, you can just remove the '(under construction)' from the title.
A large amount of information on many of these topics already exists
here and there about the web, and we are hoping to collect it all
here in the form of easy to understand step by step how-to guides.
If you claim a topic, please feel free to incorporate any of the
information which already exists at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/
Programming:WebObjects (the reason we are not simply expanding this
site is that there was a strong consensus that the formatting options
and general ease of use of the wiki was not as good as that of the
confluence wiki at objectstyle.org). A good example of the kind of
article we are hoping for is http://wiki.objectstyle.org/confluence/
display/WOL/Create+a+new+WO+Application.
Screenshots are a good idea, and simple instructions are also good.
If you choose to write an article about how to add a google map to a
web page, the reader should be able to get a good idea of what they
are, how they work, how to add them, how to acquire an api key, pros
and cons of using them in various ways, configuration options, how
wonder simplifies the process, etc. by the time they have read it.
It should ideally be thorough enough to satisfy the curiosity of
either someone who wants to know all about it, or just someone who
needs to know the nuts and bolts to finish a feature for a project
they are working on.
Finally, the hierarchy of articles is not complete, and likely never
will be. If you can think of a topic that is missing, please add it,
and hopefully someone (perhaps yourself!) will fill in the content in
then near future.
Thanks,
Mark
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